ELLSWORTH — When doctors saw that Maureen Beck was born without her left hand and arm below the elbow, they floated the idea of amputating her toes and “install[ing] them as fingers” in place of her hand.

“I was born in 1986, which [I’m told] was a pretty wild and crazy time,” Beck writes in a post on her blog, “Mo in Mountains.” “Like I said, drugs were cool back then.”